Sunday 10 June 2001 07.55 EDT
First published on Sunday 10 June 2001 07.55 EDT

Howard Hodgkin's painting dramatises the unexpectedness of powerful emotion. He carries the possibility of that sudden drama in person, too.

He's sipping coffee in the bright morning light outside the Dulwich Picture Gallery, where a selection of his work is shortly to be hung among the Poussins and Watteaus. He's 70 next year, but not thinking much about posterity, so he seems vaguely amused by the prospect of his paintings briefly sharing wall space with these exquisite fixtures. I wonder if he has been wandering around fretting about exactly what should go where. He laughs: no, he's just been wandering around. 'Well, I've always felt an affinity for Poussin, in a way,' he says, 'but of course it's ridiculous to say that. It's like being asked as a young artist which painters you admire, and saying, well, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Picasso...'

In a student essay Hodgkin once described Poussin's paintings as 'monuments in defiance of time' and he would love to think of his own work in the same light. But the similarity, he insists, ends there. 'The great difficulty between being an artist now and an artist back then was that everything then was done to order, on commission, and therefore somebody else was taking a lot of the responsibility for choices you made. 'Now,' he says, a little forlornly, eyes sparkling, 'you have to provide for yourself. I remember reading a comment by Matisse that said "Nowadays an artist has got to be his own patron, his own critic and his own audience." I certainly feel that a lot of the time.'

Hodgkin typically makes glum statements about his art; but seems to enjoy doing so hugely. His own monuments against time are acts of highly personal defiance. His paintings are fragmentary adventures, captured from his life and recreated in oil on wood. Sometimes their genesis is given away in their titles, Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi, In Tangier, After Visiting David Hockney. I wonder if these private epiphanies announce themselves as they happen, or if they settle in his memory first.

'They sometimes are clear straight away,' he says. 'Otherwise you wake up in the middle of the night and think "Oh my God!"' But still, the moment of revelation is only a small part of it. Hodgkin then has to turn the remembrance of things past into something else - his unique language of colour, of extraordinary 'stripes and dots' - which, as he says, understatedly, 'takes a lot of trial and error' (many of the paintings he has reworked for a decade to get right) .

It's a Romantic impulse, then, 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'?

'Well it's not always tranquillity,' he says. 'It's more like Henry James said: "Our passion is our work, the rest is the madness of art." It's more like that: the madness of art. That's remained a constant...'

And, oddly, for a few seconds, just at the thought of this, he starts to cry, his voice breaks, tears well up, and then just as suddenly, he stops, and his pin-sharp blue eyes blink a little into the sun.

It's tempting to begin to think of Howard Hodgkin as a last survivor. When he was in New York recently he was asked to give a lecture. He wasn't sure what he would talk about. 'And they said, "Well, couldn't you talk about painting. You see, nobody does it much any more."' The sense of stubbornness, of being at odds with his 'conceptual' times, seems to be encapsulated in his figure, which has thickened, and his gait, a sea captain's roll, which even 20 years ago his late friend Bruce Chatwin called 'butting into a whirlwind'. Hodgkin laughs at the idea of his singularity though. 'Someone recently descibed me as the standard bearer for painting,' he says, 'but I'm not standard bearer for anything, never would be.' The gait is a by-product of arthritis in his knees and hips.

When he looks around himself, he does, however, regret a little that there 'are such enormous gaps in the art world between what I do, and what other people do. I mean that so few people make one-off paintings, and that wasn't the isolated activity it has become.'

He says he was recently sent a catalogue from Christie's for a sale of contemporary art. 'There is an artist I've never heard of who in the autumn is selling a cake of soap,' he says. 'And the soap has a rather beautiful spiral design on it; and it turns out that the spiral is one of this guy's pubic hairs. And when I looked at this thing I found myself wondering - well, it surely must be more than one, it's so long... But also I did think that it was something of a defining moment in the history of taste. I think it was the first time in my life I have just laughed at a work of art. I mean, I couldn't see any reason not to.'

The direction of the work of some younger artists perhaps adds to the sense of isolation he identifies. When he thinks of his own situation, he says, he's often reminded of a book put together after James Pope Hennessy's death called A Lonely Business. 'When you read the book and you realise what he got up to in his life it does not sound very lonely at all. But of course when you are doing the work, the writing in his case, it is completely lonely. And all the rest is not really compensation.'

'All the rest' in Hodgkin's case is well trawled through. He married in his twenties, had two sons. Then he came out as gay in the late Seventies, had a series of lovers before settling with his current partner Antony Peattie, the music writer. Hodgkin is a generous gossip, even in our brief meeting he requests a couple of times that I turn off my tape so he can recount a story about a friend, but he regrets a little that his own life has become the stuff of gossip columns and magazine profiles ('though these days of course you can make a career of it, like Tracey Emin').

One of the stranger results of this reluctant celebrity (Chatwin described him as longing both 'for fame, and for oblivion') has been, he says, that people you don't really know feel obliged almost to tell you what they think of you in front of your pictures. 'Which is very odd. Because mostly painting is like putting a message in a bottle and flinging it into the sea.'

Still, he finds it irresistible to find out what people do think. It was a habit he learned early. 'When I was a schoolboy,' he says, 'I painted a picture which was quite dreadful, neither child art or something grown up. But the art master propped it up on open day and I hid under the table in great discomfort, hoping that I would hear what people said. I remember, three sets of parents said nothing at all, then a couple came up and said absolutely appalling things about the picture... which of course is what I deserved.'

The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon speaks of the 'sense in which Hodgkin's paintings make children of those who look at them... his art constantly reincarnates the child's sense of the weirdness of the world'. Talking to him, you find yourself fascinated by his own growing up, perhaps because he seems to have retained this vision, perhaps because his background sounds so rich in possibility. He says he never had a choice of vocation, painting chose him. He came from an unfulfilled branch of a family of high achievers - among them 'the father of meteorology', the discoverer of Hodgkin's disease, the critic Roger Fry and the poet Robert Bridges - and so his childhood was punctuated with glimpses of other, bolder lives. He conceived of the idea of becoming an artist while evacuated, stylishly, in a former governor's residence on Long Island. Friends of his mother would take him to the Museum of Modern Art, and in the Cézannes and Matisses he saw the chance of other more vivid worlds.

He describes his childhood now as awkward rather than difficult. 'The thing was, I had wonderful teachers at Eton, Bryanston, everywhere,' he says. 'I was always treated with great respect by someone, when I was a child, and that's all you need, I think.' On one occasion, he ran away from his prep school, aged eight or nine and was spotted by a policeman. 'He asked me, teasing. "Why did you run away? Do they really beat up small children there?" And I said no, it was because I wanted to be an artist. And he took that absolutely straight. As a perfectly rea sonable reason. And when I got home, he told my parents.'

His parents had some trouble with this ambition in their son. 'My mother always wanted me to be a diplomat,' he says. 'God knows why, I'm about the most undiplomatic temperament I can think of.' His father, an avid and inspired collector of alpine plants, who spent his days working at Imperial Chemicals and hated it, was 'somewhat more supportive'.

Did they ever have any of his paintings in the house I wonder? Hodgkin smiles thinly. 'In my third exhibition my father asked which painting I liked best,' he says. 'And he said "Well, perhaps I should buy that then". In the end he gave it to a gallery because he wasn't allowed to hang it on the wall at home.'

When he was saying, Hodgkin's father, 'a frustrated plantsman', was given the Victoria Gold Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society. His son seems to have inherited from him a controlled mania for collecting (he has an extensive and important private collection of Indian art), and also learned a great fear of lost time, of waste.

As he gets older, that fear, of course, heightens. 'I'm very aware of time getting short,' he says. 'And I regret very much wasting some of my time. I mean I've always worked. Every day I've worked, but it never seems quite enough somehow.'

He goes every morning to his studio next to his home in Bloomsbury 'and then I start work, which probably means looking with despair at a particular picture for a very long time'.

How much of the time is he looking and how much of the time is he painting? 'Well, I never draw any distinction between the two,' he says. 'I try increasingly to do a lot of the hard work in my head. My earlier picures were a mass of paintings all on top of each other, and I don't really like that any more. So I cer tainly try to get past some of those decisions before I paint.'

In Hodgkin's recent work - the paintings completed since his wonderful, confident 1997 retrospective at the Hayward gallery - the structure seems rawer, more rough edged.

'They are more loosely painted I suppose,' he says. 'I think what I do now is more naked, more direct than it used to be, and I haven't bothered to fill up all the little holes so much.'

Does he begin to see this as Late Hodgkin? He says he never really thinks in terms of those progressions. 'One of the greatest artists in old age was Titian whose last pictures are so incredible, because it is as if he became a whole new painter. I mean, astonishing!'

Does he feel the possibility of that in himself? 'Well I suppose we all hope for some kind of extraordinary new lease on life,' he says, looking for wood to knock on. 'I mean there are artists who say, you know "Now I am old, everything is better than it has ever been". Well of course it is not. But in terms of painting, though I find the work more and more difficult, I do find that the results are getting ever nearer to what I want.'

I give him a lift back into central London. In the car on the way he tells gossipy little stories about friends and dealers, some of which he has me promise not to repeat, stories of trips down the Nile with Susan Sontag and Annie Liebowitz, the indiscretions of New York gallery owners, and he gives the impression of wonderful intellectual glamour, the life Bruce Chatwin would have loved to hear about. And then I drop him off at his studio, and as he walks determinedly up the road, I have a sudden sense of another life, the one in which he stares all day at paintings, the lonely one.